A Short and Touching Love Story 2
He was in the hospital, suffering from lung cancer.
Whenever she had free time, she would often visit him to talk. Because his days were numbered, even the tiniest shred of joy was, for him, a condensation of years, or even decades, of happiness for others.
He studied archaeology. He was deeply passionate about his field and had many dreams for the future. He would often share interesting archaeological facts with her, such as the silk books from the Han Tombs at Mawangdui and the stone drum inscriptions from the pre-Qin period. He said those ancient characters were beautiful, so he had been diligently learning those hard-to-recognize scripts, like oracle bone script and large and small seal script.
One day, he suddenly suggested, “Let’s play a game. You give me a poem or a verse, and I’ll write it in large seal script. Let’s see if I’ve mastered the writing.” She happily obliged, watching him seriously write the variously shaped characters with a small wolf-hair brush on the gold-speckled xuan paper. Even though she couldn’t understand a single character, she still cheerfully said, “It looks great!”
After that, he frequently asked her to give him challenges. Each time she watched the brush move slowly across the paper in his hand, she couldn’t bear to look. The twisting and turning lines seemed to tighten around her heart.
Autumn arrived, and white petals from the trees along the road fluttered down in the wind. She walked sorrowfully, as if traversing a street showered with teardrops. He was no longer in this world. She placed the 45 sheets of gold-speckled paper he left her into a small pearwood box, burying it deep within her memories.
Years passed; she got married and had a daughter. In a flash, two decades went by. Sometimes she would suddenly fall into a daze. However, much had faded into oblivion with the passage of time.
One day, her daughter brought her boyfriend home. Somehow, they stumbled upon the pearwood box. The young man, a graduate student in calligraphy, opened the slightly yellowed pages and exclaimed, “How romantic, using large seal script to write love letters!” She was taken aback and quickly ran over to have the young man read them to her.
“You are still as adorable as you were when you were little! I really want to tell you how much I like you… But in my current state, saying these things would be so irresponsible… Luckily, you can’t understand these characters that look like drawings, so I can still ‘tell’ you in front of you…”
After hearing the contents of the last page, a rainstorm spanning over twenty years of time fell. She hadn’t felt the deepest love that was right by her side! She had overlooked the profound vows he wrote on paper! Because of love and selflessness, he chose silence, not allowing something to start only to end tragically, letting her peacefully enjoy decades of life.
Through tear-filled eyes, she saw him from years ago, gently explaining what an artifact is: “Because it is deeply and peacefully buried, it is precious.”
Thank you for reading! ” Sitestorys “
